Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less because it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not give a second line of selected genes.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each generation of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed across slightly different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear out of the population entirely. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to make something new finds there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir can only exists as long as people keep growing it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is rare, since most people do not keep one long enough to look. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it carries the resin genes worth passing on.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female flowers under normal conditions is rejected without exception; the trait is the one thing worth breeding forward.
- Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen early are frequently the less desirable in other respects; breeders favour moderate shedders.
A Pack Is a Population
A mistake new regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of running it is to see the spread and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: height, flowering time, smell, density, tolerance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents which are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning chosen parents means making the next generation, and here the options open up. Three methods cover most of what home breeders attempt.
- Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It tightens the genetics fast and is useful when one plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few picked females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two selected plants and express less spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is built.
- Open pollination. Allow each male reach every female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation not refinement.
Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people keeping them treat diversity as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect also flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the product no service.
A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone unable to check the plants each day around the start of flower, since a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a specific famous plant repeated as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and at some point to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.